Jürgen Klinsmann

Jürgen Klinsmann, (born July 30, 1964, Göppingen, West Germany), German football (soccer) player and coach who helped West Germany win the 1990 World Cup and was twice named his country’s Footballer of the Year.

A prolific goal scorer as a young boy, Klinsmann joined the youth side of the lower-division Stuttgarter Kickers club at age 14 and made his debut on the club’s professional side at 17. He joined the Bundesliga (Germany’s top football division) club VfB Stuttgart in 1984. Klinsmann was the Bundesliga’s leading scorer during the 1987–88 season, and he was named the 1988 West German Footballer of the Year. After helping Stuttgart reach the 1989 Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Cup final, he left his home country to play club football for Italy’s Inter Milan.

As a member of Inter, Klinsmann helped the club win the Italian Super Cup in 1989 and the UEFA Cup in 1991 before he left the team to join AS Monaco of the French Ligue 1 in 1992. He led Monaco to an appearance in the 1994 Champions League semifinals, a feat that—combined with the five goals he scored in that summer’s World Cup—contributed to his earning German Player of the Year honours. In addition to gaining fame as one of the top strikers in the sport, he developed a reputation for diving (feigning being fouled in an attempt to draw a penalty against an opponent). He both embraced and mocked this reputation at his next stop, Tottenham Hotspur of the English Premier League, when he began diving facedown across the pitch to celebrate his goals, a playful move that endeared him to many of England’s notoriously demanding fans. After playing one season with Tottenham, Klinsmann signed with Bayern Munich in his home country. He led Bayern in goals scored in each of his seasons with the team, helping to capture another UEFA Cup (1996) and a Bundesliga title (1996–97) in the process. Klinsmann finished his club career by playing short stints with Italy’s Sampdoria and with Tottenham in 1997–98.

Klinsmann made his international football debut for West Germany in 1987. He was a key member of the West German team that captured the country’s third World Cup title in 1990. Klinsmann was named the captain of a reunified German national team in 1994. He led Germany to quarterfinal finishes in the 1994 and 1998 World Cup competitions as well as to the 1996 European Championship. Following the 1998 World Cup, he retired from both club and international football.

After his retirement Klinsmann relocated to the United States, where he was a partner in a sports marketing consulting agency and served as an adviser to the Los Angeles Galaxy of Major League Soccer. In 2004 he returned to Germany to manage the men’s national team, which he led to a third-place finish in the 2006 World Cup before resigning shortly after the tournament. After a stint managing Bayern Munich during the 2008–09 season that saw him get fired with five games remaining in the Bundesliga schedule, Klinsmann was hired to coach the U.S. men’s national team (USMNT) in 2011.

Klinsmann’s first year of heading the U.S. team was uneventful and led to public speculation that his job might already be in jeopardy, but in 2013 he guided the team to a national-record 12-game winning streak, which was capped off with a Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF) Gold Cup tournament victory. The USMNT then had a promising performance at the 2014 World Cup, surviving the so-called “group of death” to qualify for the 16-team knockout round, in which it was eliminated by Belgium. The team placed fourth in the 2016 Copa América Centenario tournament, but it had failed to demonstrate the marked improvement and well-defined style of play that many thought the hiring of Klinsmann would bring. In November 2016, after the team lost its first two games in CONCACAF qualification play for the 2018 World Cup—which included the team’s first-ever home loss to rival Mexico—Klinsmann was fired from the USMNT.

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